


In Between

by slipshod



Category: Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)
Genre: Creeper Finn, Imprisonment, Masturbation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 10:53:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2809712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slipshod/pseuds/slipshod





	In Between

**Author's Note:**

  * For [galaxysoup](https://archiveofourown.org/users/galaxysoup/gifts).



Snow's father was a noble king and a great warrior. Even when she sneaked into the servants' quarters, unseen, and listened to gossip she wasn't meant to hear, she never heard an ill word spoken against him. 

 

"Mother," she began, curious and worried as her mother wiped soot off her face with a white handkerchief, "I have heard that if one ventures too far from home, he can fall off the edge of the world. Is that true?" 

 

Her mother paused, turned Snow's face toward her with her gentle grip on her chin. "Where did you hear that, my love?" 

 

"Old San told me when I asked her about the knights who don't return from battle." 

 

The queen pursed her lips and turned Snow's face back so she could resume her task. "It is a sad truth that those knights who don't return, they have lost their lives in the service of our kingdom." 

 

Snow gasped, but her mother continued. 

 

"Your father grows his territory by attacking regions whose rule is weak, corrupt. Places where the people are suffering. His knights are proud to serve him, even unto death." 

 

Snow knows this to be true. Some of the castle's servants come from duchies that fell to her father's rule, and many of them have shadowed eyes and tell dark, hushed stories of their lives before. 

 

"And beside, the world is round, like a ball. If you go very far, you would just come about the other side. No man has ever traveled that far, but your father would, to come home to you. No distance could keep him from your sweet heart," her mother said. "Or your filthy face." 

 

* * *

 

She didn't scream when she found her father's body. She did not cry. 

 

But it was the first time she had truly known what fear felt like. She had had glimmers of it before, the nightmares she had sometimes when her father was long at the front, when William pretended to fall off the rampart, when she realized how gravely ill her mother was, she was afraid. When she looked upon her father, though, his shirt soaked red, blood pooling in the sheets, turning dark in the long chasm across his throat as unnatural black veins reached up his face like twisted fingers beneath his ashen skin, she felt fear seize her like a living thing. Stronger than her horror or shock, the fear grasped her heart like a vice and squeezed. So that it could not freeze her, she moved. 

 

Later, when she was locked in her new prison and the immediate danger had passed, she did not cry yet. 

 

She was afraid, still. Afraid of what was happening to her father's loyal guards, the servants - her friends. She was afraid of what may still happen to her, selfish a thought though it seemed to be. She was alone in this world, her father slain, all of those who might care for her lost. She feared the silent guard posted outside her cell door, unnaturally still no matter how long he stood there. She feared the unknown shadows, the terrible, harsh noises from the courtyard. As the darkness wore on, she began to fear for her father's immortal soul. Had he done evil in marrying Ravenna? Snow had thought her kind and beautiful, but the devil comes in many forms to tempt mankind, she had been told. The fear in her heart remained and grief settled over her like a cold, heavy blanket, but she did not cry then because she could still glimpse the guard on the other side of the door, could still hear footsteps, both calm and hurried, and thought it better to remain alert than to let tears blur her thoughts. She kept her breathing even and listened carefully as the cries from outside the small window fading into muted, chilling ones that seemed to originate in the tower, seemingly magnified in the cold air. 

 

Later still, days later, when she knew she should have been in mourning for the king, the last of her blood, she did not cry. 

 

Because her fear has turned to anger, and it feels like an ugly thing touching her heart, a disease that would turn her, like rotting fruit. Her battle now is with herself more than any threat from outside her cell, and she spends hours at a time trying not to feel it. She tries remembering happier times, being in her father's arms, chasing William through the courtyard, her mother telling her her heart was beautiful and strong. Her heart is strong enough not to give into this, she tells herself. She lets her horror, her revulsion, her bone-deep sadness wash over her, but tells herself she has no place in her for hatred. There's a small pallet where she sleeps, and she curls up and stews there for hours. She stares out her high window but all she can see is the sun, and it burns her. She listens but can only hear metal footsteps on cold stone. The soldiers who bring her paltry meals are hollow, lifeless. 

 

* * *

 

 One day, nearly two weeks into her imprisonment, she sees two magpies circling each other and she feels lighter. Their sweet, tuneless warbling soothes something in her, and she is reminded that there is life outside her prison walls and her own mind. She takes stock of her surroundings. She clears the dirt from around her pallet and sweeps it into the corner with her hands. She stacks her empty wooden plates sets them against the little door slot where they put her food, along with the bucket she had been using for waste. She looks about for other things to occupy her, and finds that if she wedges her hands and bare feet in between the stones around the cold fireplace, she can climb up high enough to see the ground in the distance outside her window. Her muscles burn with the action of climbing, and strain to keep her up there, but she stares at the green grass and the crashing sea for as long as her body is able. 

 

When she wakes in the morning, the plates are gone and the waste bucket replaced with an empty one.

 

That evening, Finn comes to see her for the first time. He watches her through the door for a minute without saying anything.

 

"Hello," she says, voice a bit hoarse from disuse. "May I ask who you are?"

  

"Yes," he replies, smiling at her manners. "My name is Finn. My sister is Ravenna, your Queen."

 

Snow doesn't respond to that. She is not practiced in the art of manipulation, but she hides her feelings from him. He leaves quietly, and checks back in on her again after a few weeks. 

 

* * *

  

It is some years before either of them speaks to the other again.

 

Snow spends her days watching the land turn from green to brown to black of death. Gradually, she doesn't have to climb so high to see out the window. She takes the food is brought every morning and evening and thanks the Lord for her meal, as she was taught. She says the Lord's prayer each morning, and tells herself any other psalms she can conjure up. She gathers up twigs and scratches little writings into old soot at the hearth and then wipes them away. Sometimes she hears movement in the corridor and crying nearby, but she still cannot see through the slot in the door. What little change the seasons bring lead her to believe she is now 13. 

 

Finn comes by to watch her now, sometimes several times a week. "Snow White," he says, and it's been years since she's heard her own name. She stands before the door and looks up at him.

 

"Finn," she says, and he smiles. "May I have a book? A Bible, perhaps?" She holds his gaze.

 

Finn looks back for a long moment with smiling eyes, reverence, almost, and Snow bows her head, panicking, thinking of retreating back into the safety of her prison, but he says, "Don't get ideas in your head, my dear," and leaves, as if nothing happened. 

 

* * *

 

When her courses begin, she has no one to guide her. She has been told this would happen, monthly, until she was with child, but it is alarming when it first happens, and she has to invent a way to cope with it. She also begins to have feverish dreams now and then, and does not know what to do about those either. She gets a feeling when she's awake, some nights, and is compelled to touch herself, which she does, confused. She casts around in her mind, searching for an idea or image to explain what she's feeling, but nothing materializes. Still, she rubs her fingers against her sex, she curls them into herself and pushes there, and gradually, shaking, reaches a place where she feels relief. 

 

* * *

 

She thinks of William, frequently, her one friend who may still exist in the world. She wonders whether he's still alive, whether anyone can live in the dead, grey world she can now see standing on her tip-toes in front of her window. She knows there are servants and serfs still here in the castle, but beyond the walls it seems there is nothing. 

 

Her magpies go away, sometimes for weeks at a time, but always return. Other birds fly to her window too, quite often, in an otherwise barren landscape. 

 

The days pass and she busies herself with keeping her small space tidy, reciting to herself to keep her mind active, and praying for the souls of her parents and for the lives of those who fell to Ravenna's rule. 

 

When she's 15, nearly 16, she thinks, she wakes to hear crying nearby, and she is finally able to look through the slot and find out who it is, to solve the mystery that has been haunting her. What she discovers gives her no peace. 

 

* * *

 

When Finn comes into her cell one day, she follows her brain rather than anything that feels right or instinctive. It is not in her nature to manipulate, the way Ravenna manipulated her father and then hurt him, but that is what she does to Finn. Her mother had told her once that she wished her to be as fair and strong as a winter rose, and Snow would do what she must to endure. 


End file.
